Retail’s Hottest Emerging Markets

Their study looks at 30 emerging countries and grades them on a number of factors, including an assessment of country risk, population size, and wealth as well as the country’s current retail saturation.

The effect of global economic challenges as well as rising tensions in the Middle East and North Africa shook up the top 10 quite a bit this year, to the benefit of many South American countries, which fared very well during the recession with an impressive economic growth rate of 6 percent.

With the growth of consumer spending sluggish at best in many developed markets, retailers have little choice but to expand their businesses to new markets if they want to compete.

You can’t afford to not think about global expansion,” said Hana Ben-Shabat, A.T. Kearney partner and co-leader of the study.

Click ahead to see which countries are the most attractive to retailers.